CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, April 02, 2013

Trey Anastasio and the Musical ‘Hands on a Hardbody’

NYTimes.com: Whether it’s superfluous kick lines or applause for the set or obligatory standing ovations, even the most die-hard Broadway zealot has a pet peeve.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I don't quite understand what the goal of this article was. It seemed, at first, to be an article about Broadway pet peeves, and then specifically, click tracks that orchestras use to stay on time. I don't know a lot about click tracks, so I was interested to read about them, but instead, it wasn't about those at all. Or really, about anything general at all, but about a show and the process of writing the music for it. Which, isn't terrible to read about, but when I reached the end of the article, I was quite disappointed in what they had ended up writing about. I must say, though, the show this is about sounds quite uninteresting. I know that creativity is running dry, but this is quite a poor concept for a show, especially something on Broadway. I seriously doubt that a show about people trying to win a Nissan truck my putting their hand on it for the longest will run for more than six weeks (or maybe even less) on Broadway.

Brian Rangell said...

It was a biographic piece about the songwriting team for Hands on a Hardbody, Kelly. The click track story set up the discussion about how the music for the show "ebbs and flows" with the weariness of the contestants, and has a more natural human sound because of the loss of the click track. I found it interesting to hear the story of the team's search for the rights to the story, how they met and decided to collaborate on this project, and then some of the particulars of their working environment.

I'd suggest you go and watch the documentary of Hands on a Hardbody before utterly smearing it - the people in the contest are each very quirky, interesting people to learn about and the entire thing is an American Dream metaphor. There's deeper stuff going on than 10 strangers touching a truck.